The rest of the eye does as it tries to focus and refocus on a dark-but-not-dark environment, and the iris goes between contracting and expanding because it can't get a read whether it should be letting in more light because the background is too dark or contracting because the letters glow too bright, and the part of the brain running the ocular show will often make its displeasure felt in the form of splitting headaches.
For similar reasons, white text on a black background, while not as bad, isn't exactly good. This is why legal pads are pale yellow, and ledgers are pale green. Contrast is good, but too much contrast hurts.
Green on black terminal windows are the way they are for the same reason old oscilloscopes and radar displays were green on black - it's more cost effective to make a cathode ray tube that glows green. For a long damn time, all terminals came green-on-black, simply because that was the cheapest way to pair a CRT with a keyboard, and hardware terminals were what they used back before PC's were popular. Or invented.
The result of this was horrific eyestrain. Yes, some people can handle bright colored text on a black background. Most get eyestrain or worse, migraines. This is especially so if you switch from green-on-black to black-on-white (like a printed page).
Typists and transcriptionists and grad students and pretty much anyone who needed to refer to a printed reference hated it. In the early '80s, color monitors were pretty much crap for text (too fuzzy, not enough resolution) so there was a boom in the production of "amber" monitors. These used monochrome CRTs that phosphoresced a muted yellow-orange. This wasn't quite as jarring to the eyes.
Then someone came up with paper-white monochrome CRT's, and that was pretty much all she wrote for greenscreens.
Geeks keep it alive, because of nostalgia and tradition. It's looks high-tech and cool, because there was a time when it was high-tech and cool - and because there is an association with Unix, and by extension, Linux. What's more Unix than a DEC vt100 terminal hooked up to a PDP-11? Nothing. That's about as close to the metal as you can get without a soldering iron.
But, please, for the sake of your eyes and the eyes of others, don't pretend there is any inherent advantage to green-on-black for the vast majority of users.
When the Israelis destroyed the new, state-of-the-art Russian air defense system in Syria in 2007, the attacking aircraft didn't even appear on the radar they were destroying, and IED attacks are way down with the introduction of tech that... are we at the point where realtime countermeasures are the true state of the art in cyberwarfare, rather than the sideshow of internet security? What's the next step? Jamming enemy ICBM go-codes? Triggering remote detonation of same? Are we already at that point?
What makes it worse is that every now and again, Apple pulls out the stops to make a keyboard or mouse that isn't just good, it's legendary.
Serious. In the "Best Keyboard Ever" sweepstakes, there's the IBM Model M, and there's the Apple Extended II at the top, and then it falls off a cliff. Nothing else is anywhere near as good. There's a company charging almost $150 for a bog-standard 110 key USB keyboard - and getting it - because its key action and layout are almost exactly like the old Extended II.
Then Apple turns around and gives us crap like the new Son of Chicklet bluetooth rattleboard or the original iMac hockey-puck mouse. Madness, I tell you.
Since this is Cisco we're talking about, I'm looking forward to long nights memorizing oddball commands to pass the certification test. I can almost feel the one-coffee-too-many burning a slow ulcer into my esophagus while puzzling over the two-and-a-half bibles thick study guide.
Cisco makes mad, crazy money from certification tests. It's a way they can squeeze another dime from both out-of-work and desperate tech workers as well as companies confused as to exactly what their CIO bought when he went to play golf and came home with the Cisco polo shirt (and, oh, yeah, some contract or something. My name is going to be in Business week, and I got a shirt!)
Money all around, and all they need to do is pretend the advances in modern GUIs, scripting tool, shells and command line utilities the rest of the industry uses don't exist.
Now they want to take this esoteric-for-esoteric's-sake aesthetic across the entire enterprise! On the one hand, having that certification will mean a huge pay jump, as no-one will be able to design, deploy or maintain the sumbitch... I won't either, but I'll be making lots of money calling in Cisco consultants to do my job for me. I might get them to bring me a polo shirt. On the other, you will never be able to bring into the server room a new technology that Cisco/VMWare doesn't want in the server room, regardless of whether or not it's the right thing for your organization. It's like Bad Old IBM all over again if this thing gets any traction.
Part of the problem is that there isn't a good solution yet, so there's a lot of effort being put into trying to find a way for a bad solution to be more comfortable.
Old-school iterative languages are a clumsy fit. They're night impossible to debug, and ones that let you do clever things at the hardware level will bring the whole project down in screaming flames when someone tries to get clever. So new libraries for old languages seldom fill the bill.
New-hotness functional languages are insane. It's very, very, very difficult for seasoned programmers to get their heads around it, and impossible for n00bz who don't have heavy math backgrounds. Compounding the issue is that the syntax tends to be on the wrong side of horrible with little or no syntactic sugar to make the medicine go down. So re-imagining the paradigm is a bit like picturing a five dimensional sphere - great fun, if you're smart enough to do it. No-one is smart enough to do it.
We're probably looking at a problem space that is best tackled by something that doesn't exist yet - an elegant, easily understood tool that simply makes sense, like objects or everything-is-a-file or scripting languages or regex. We're seeing so many different approaches to MPP because programmers are trying to figure out what that tool is. Once someone hits on it, the field will shake itself out.
Since we haven't hit on it, too much choice is a good thing - it means people will take the initiative to do something on their own that works better, rather than trying to get something suboptimal to work because it's the "standard".
First things first... decide if you want the focus of the hobby to be the scopes or the stargazing.
If you're serious about the stargazing, forget the pricey glass. Get a decent set of binoculars and a few good books, and one of those plastic "Star Wheel" sky charts.
For the binocs, a basic pair of 10x70's will set you back a hundred and fifty bucks or so online. For the books, try Astronomy for Dummies and Left Turn at Orion. Also, your library will have back issues of Sky and Telescope - read 'em, and then visit their site. They have star maps you can print out that shows what's worth looking at each month. Try not to be too put out by their over-agressive marketeering.
The learning curve will be steeper than a big-bucks robotic "Goto Scope" that aims and focuses for you, but with a nice lawn chair, some decent binoculars and a rough understanding of what you're pointing them at, a night under the stars won't fail to deliver a few thrills.
Once that gets old, then look into the big-money glass. Telescopes, on their own, are a pretty damn rewarding hobby, especially once you get into making and modding them yourself. But unless you really, really know what you're after, dropping a grand on glass isn't a good idea. It likely won't be anywhere near what you want once you understand what that is.
There's also the issue of deep sky surveys - these require looooooooooooong exposures. If you park your butt in front of a telescope in your backyard for a look through it, you will see more detail the longer you're parked. Your eye is able to pick out more information with longer exposure. So it is with imaging. Yeah, a really big mirror like on Palomar means you don't need to spend as much time imaging the same section of space as a smaller scope to capture equivalent detail, but here's the deal: the HST can look at the same thing for 20 minutes at a time, ekeing out every last little photon it can from the scene. Then it will do it all over again on the next orbit. And again, and again... each 20 minute pass adding to the cumulative light captured, until it's equivalent to an eleven day exposure. You're not going to get lucky enough to get eleven days worth of distortion-free viewing from a terrestrial scope without inviting in all sorts of software artifacts, sorry.
So, Lucky Imaging's a great step forward for some dirtside scope applications... less so for others, and not a replacement at all for a decent space-based instrument.
1) Intelligent enough to win a D&D tournament 2) Lucky enough with the dice to win a D&D tournament 3) Big and strong enough to literally bash through a wall
Then, yes, the one, single, supa-hot D&D honey will be all-up-ons. And lordy, lordy, will she ever be into cosplay, with more vinyl and leather than you can conceive of... super bonus round for fetish-addled roleplay freaks. Hot chicks love a fat geek, so long as he can kill a jock with his bare hands and understands the difference between her Sailor Moon costume and her Sailor Mars costume.
OK, the guy covers Japan, and sneers about the lack of uppercrust genes making their way downward to the hoi-polloi of Japanese society.
Yet he somehow fails to mention they went from medieval backwater to global Superpower in about the same amount of time it takes a Skyline GTR to go from zero to sixty. Just ask the Russians - they might still have Czars if the Japanese hadn't kicked the crap out of the mighty Russian Imperial Navy, a scant half-century after the Black Ships arrived. They're still a global superpower, in terms of industrial, scientific and economic influence. They were in the "Malthusan Trap" because the nobility liked it that way, and could get away with it until the advent of the steam engine. No other reason.
So, in short, the book's crap, and just another excuse for right-wingers to justify spreading colonialism the globe over, as some sort of natural gift given to them for being better bred than the mud-people.
The Fermi paradox is just proof that there are much better forms of communication technology waiting to be discovered. Ansible users are at a stage where it probably doesn't occur to them that a culture worth talking to would use electromagnetic radiation as a communications carrier.
You're European, so you can be forgiven if you've never seen 1) a real American SUV and 2) a real American Home Depot. Jetta wagons generally don't cut it when there are sheets of plywood to be hauled around.
The typical American family is a two car family. One of these cars will be a sensible sedan. One of them will be a truck - Pickup, SUV or minivan. This is because big trucks are practical for moving people, carrying stuff anf towing things. Otherwise, they'd be spending like no tomorrow on muscle cars like the Mustang, which are much more bad-ass and look-at-me-cool than a bland-as-stale-bread Chevy Tahoe or Ford F150.
Also, the "Estate Wagons" the SUV's replaced were in some cases considerably larger than the SUV's now. Do a GIS for "Caprice Station Wagon" sometime.
So, the cars just won't be getting smaller due to cultural influences I don't expect you to understand... it's just so. The trick is then not to sell smaller cars, but to make larger cars more efficient and lighter. The whole deal about "the mountain coming to Muhommed" and King Canute with the waves thing. The Prius makes a mid-size car subcompact efficient. This is the right way to go.
Tiny cars don't sell well. They're difficult to schlep kids to school and a dozen bags of mulch home from Lowe's. Small cars are seen as unitakers, and most americans need their cars to fill a number of roles.
Plus, without a way to recharge the battery in roughly the time it takes to fill up a gas tank, what the hell are these things good for? Short distance commuting? Corbin already tried it, with a better looking mini-car, and failed. Miserably. Americans generally have no use for automotive unitaskers - most of them have long highway commutes and the occasional road-trip, and they want to do both in the same car.
Ugly cars also don't sell well. I don't mean "Quirky styling" like the Scion xB or Suzuki Aero, or bland styling, like a Chrysler Sebring or Toyota Corolla. I mean, East German levels of "Couldn't Be Bothered With It" styling: truly and deeply misguided design choices no-one paused to give a second thought to, complete with panel gaps you can see with the naked eye from low earth orbit and colors chosen for their complete inability to catch the eye.
Efficient and cheap isn't going to get you anywhere near public acceptance. It's got to offer a lot more... the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius look goood, they're slick productions with a lot more to offer than 50mpg. The Prius in particular has been successful because it offers near-luxury comfort and conveniences with econobox mileage and futuristic styling. (The other hybrid makers are also having a hard time grokking this, so we get Hybrid Civics and Mariners no-one is particularly enthusiastic over.)
The Smart FourTwo is a tiny, inexpensive car with great styling and sybaritic creature comforts, and Daimler =still= won't bring it to the US because there's no real market for it here. The Think, an ugly plug-in doo-dad, is doomed before it even starts. Dell? Try Osbourne.
Yeah, right.... And all those purchasers of 300hp cars are thinking of outrunning the cops?
No, they're just planning to break traffic laws. Unless you believe they'll all stay under the posted speed limit, not engage in stoplight drags or peel out on public roadways. I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale you'll just love if that's the case. They buy powerful cars because they envision using them. The right to own a powerful car comes with the responsibility to use that power wisely. Not everyone will.
If I was going up against multiple assailants with body armor, none of your listed weapons would be on my list, for one reason - good luck getting a followup shot in from those hand cannons. And I don't even want to think about firing a "scandium-alloy.44 magnum wheelgun"... That sounds like that would break your wrist on the first shot, let alone allow for a followup shot.
The sort of gun buyer interested in defeating police body armor isn't going to be at the range practicing double-tap combat technique. They want something that they can pull on an unsuspecting target at point-blank range.
If you want to go through any armor known to man with a shotgun, just use a good old slug round.
The Box o' Truth disagrees with you on this.
Take your anti-gun trolling claims of "cop killer" elsewhere...
I'm not anti-gun by any stretch. I believe anyone who can show they are responsible and educated in their responsibilities should be able to own any damn thing they please. That said, I don't have romantic notions about most gun owners being responsible or educated in their responsibilities, nor do I have any illusions that snub-nosed revolvers chambered for Bear Medicine rounds are meant for brown bear when the owner is in Baltimore.
If anything, it means that greater effort needs to be spent in developing and deploying body armor and bulletproofing in general. Don't get me started on what a modern lever-action rifle loaded with Buffalo Bore.45-70 rounds could do to an armored limo... and there are models out there that break down to fit into a slimline briefcase.
I dunno. There's a lot of new stupid-huge caliber snub revolvers on the market. Ruger's Redhawk Alaskan in.454 Casull and.480, and now S&W and Taurus have.500 S&W snubbies. Any of these weapons will shred any vest on the market, while offering a high degree of concealability. There are scandium-alloy.44 magnum wheelguns out there that will penetrate most vests, while weighing less than standard police-issue service autopistol. More powerful weapons are showing up in the autoloader arena, too, like the FN 5.7 and specialty "full house" rounds being developed for the 1911 frame. Gun buyers have to be thinking of defeating body armor when purchasing these weapons, as grizzly attacks in the cities and suburbs aren't exactly on the rise... yet that's where the sales of the "hand cannons" are the strongest.
The police, them have a little gun/ So when I'm on the streets, I walk around with a bigger one. - KRS-One
The song remains the same. Better equipped cops usually means better equipped cop killers. The availability of tungsten buckshot in magnum shells is also telling... body armor is getting marginally better while anti-armor weapons are getting dramatically better.
Of course there's competition, and it can be quite fierce. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comes immediately to mind. These projects have developers and users that are in fierce competition with each other. See also emacs vs. vi, Apache vs. Lighttpd, Python vs. Ruby. The difference is that Postgres "stealing" MySQL code would be pointless... it doesn't fit in with the project direction. This is why the vim project hasn't eagerly taken all of GNU's emacs code and rolled it into their latest realease... "vi - now with emacs!"
In the open source world, the competition is to create the most useful product for any given niche.
In the closed source world, it's (generally) to drive out all the competition from your niche, to increase your market share and thereby your profitability. This is why they're paranoid about their source code falling into the wrong hands. Oracle is a prime example of a company that doesn't really understand this distinction - yes, they "stole" a Linux distro to get into the Linux service provider game. Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell are giving a collective yawn - they're in business to provide the best product for a given niche, and by engineering it, they know customers will come to them before they go to a "me too" distro vendor for support on a codebase they didn't even engineer. Oracle would have done better for itself if it decided to adopt one of the non-commercial distros like Debian or Gentoo and advertised support services for it rather than trying to gain a "jump" on Red Hat by swiping their distro. Not only does Red Hat not care, they're likely to clean up by competing with Oracle as the best service provider for Oracle's own produic. (Whether or no Red Hat =is= the best service provider, or is rusting on its laurels is not within the scope of discussion.)
None of the example countries that became modern democracies were Islamic. Religion that demands theocracy cannot tolerate democracy. That isn't a genetic barrier, but a deep, superstitious cultural barrier.
I hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing secular from religious power in Islamic society were broken by the Umyyad Dynasty less than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad. You may want to spend some time with Wikipedia on the history of Islam and Arab culture... and no, the two are not the same thing.
Theocracy is no more inimical to Islam than it is to Christianity... and it's plagued both. Theocratic rule can be justified by fanatics cherry-picking verses from scripture, and used as an excuse to do scary and psychotic things, no matter what your religion. (See: Spanish Inquisition, Forced Conversion in the Americas, 30 Years War, Hugenot suppression, etc.) Given their respective histories, I'd be more suspect of Mormons seeking a theocracy than mainstream Shia and Suuni. The problem is, the mainstream is being marginalized by the fanatics these days, and this seems to be a global issue not limited to Islam.
Also note, Bosnia is now a modern democracy after a rough start, as is Kyrgyzstan and Albania, all of them Islamic. Might as well toss in the Autonomous Regions of Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo... two stable and progressive Islamic democracies.
Most of Europe never had Democracy. It came to pass as all national conflicts were being won by liberal democracies... or as close to a liberal democracy as was possible in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's only come to the Eastern European powers... Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia... in the past 15 years. They seem to be doing OK with the concept despite only Czechoslovakia having any experience at all with democracy. South Korea and Taiwan have all moved from authoritarianism to democracy with great results. Democracy starts slowly, and gradually improves itself... in early-stage democracy, it's more about the promise than the actuality. The United States had a small issue with slavery, as you may recall, and with its treatment of the indigenous peoples. Still, it's a lot better today than it was even forty years ago. Democracy, with it's partners Human Rights and Rule of Law, allows progress to happen.
I harbor contempt and distrust for the mindset that certain types of people are somehow genetically exempt from modern forms of self-government... to my ears, it sounds suspiciously like "Democracy, Human Rights and the Rule of Law only applies to rich white people, because they're the only ones intelligent and enlightened enough to benefit from it."
(That said, forcing change from the outside at gunpoint seldom works well - for any governmental system imposed. See: Iraq. Engagement in the form of clever political pressure, applied covertly inside the nation and through geopolitical maneuvering, works somewhat better. This is the best course of action in Russia's case.)
Buffer overruns happen. Security models have holes. This is nothing new, and you'll find it in damn near every software project of any complexity.
The rational ways of dealing with this are a very dictatorial style of project management to get it right the first time (See: OpenBSD) or a quick and responsive way to kill security-affecting bugs dead. Firefox, with its gazillions of volunteer and paid programmers, opt for the latter. Too often, closed source developers just sit on these bugs, or sue the people trying to find and publish them, or use their marketing department to cover for their developers' shortcomings.
I'm pleased and reassured that Firefox is having these issues. Active and open security research will always result in a stronger product, and delays to deal with them are acceptable so long as the software is better for it. Even OpenBSD's been hacked a few times, and it's how you deal with it that's more important.
Microsoft's stuff is broken for =years=, which allows a security nightmare. Firefox is broken for a few days, or a month or two... too quick for all but the most dedicated and talented black-hats to take advantage of. Give me this over Internet Exploder any day.
When will we see a stable and secure project? That's an important question when dealing with closed source products. On something like Mozilla, with an open development model, the project goals and progress aren't company secrets... we actually know exactly why something has been pushed back, and can make reasonable judgements about when it will be back on track for ourselves. This is one of the more important aspects of open source that corporate IT overlooks... the ability to plan for and work around changes in the release schedule.
So, yeah, setbacks happen. To everyone. How the setbacks are dealt with is where the rubber meets the road. Firefox is generally ahead of the industry here, too.
It's a clear sign that Google is growing way too fast for its own good, and spending crazy money on stupid things simply for the sake of spending crazy money. It's in Microsoft's best interest to spend down some of its war-chest to get Google to bankrupt itself with follies, or at least get it down to Yahoo-size in terms of industry influence.
Microsoft can afford spending what seems to be stupid-huge money as a long-range strategy of slowing and co-opting all software technology advancement... it will stifle, then copy, then control then monopolize any and all emerging technology markets. It will spend whatever it costs and take however long it needs to meet these goals. In the end, Microsoft will either make a mint, or make damn sure no-one else can.
Google needs to start saving some of its massive new revenue to build a war-chest, and work on solidifying and expanding the control of the market it's already got. Building the War-Chest, massive reserves of cash and assets that can be flipped for a quick buck, is especially important. John Sculley did this at Apple just before things went bad, and it saw the company through years and years of hell. Playing Microsoft's money-wasting game, acting like it's the '70s in Silicon Valley, will get you bankrupt and wondering where the good times went.
The years have dimmed my recollection, but you are right on all counts. The accuracy with which you describe the horror of AUI and BNC T-connectors (and terminators that always detach themselves for no good reason) indicates that you might still be living with these abominations... kill it... kill it with fire...
OK. This was in the late nineties for a small computer hardware firm that had been in business since the '70s... but still, there was no excuse for this. It was a rambling wreck, a crazy collection of every ethernet standard implementation, and a few that were decidedly non-standard, just sort of tossed into place as time went on.
The backbone was a five port AUI concentrator... it was too primitive to be called a hub. (AUI was Sun's insane proprietary ethernet connector.) Hanging off that was a Sun server that was shiny and new when the Soviet Union was still in the news, which was the router to the DMZ, and a media adapter for thicknet. That thumb-thick yellow cable snaked over to the engineering cubes and hardware labs, with "vampire taps" hanging off it everywhere - vampire taps have a screw that drills into the cable, which is how you hook stuff up to thicknet. No lie. These were connected to 10Base-5 thin-net adapters, which hooked up to co-ax concentrators, which hooked up to AUI media adapters which hooked up to the various Sun workstations. I had never seen before, nor have I seen since, a BNC co-ax hub used just to hook up workstations in a star topology... for whatever reason, they decided that ring topology wasn't good enough to string five lightly used workstations together. I have no idea why any of this worked. It usually didn't, and needed various pieces of arcane equipment power-cycled and jiggled and cursed at to get any data to make it from the file servers to the workstations.
It gets worse. Another port on the AUI concentrator went to the Cabletron TPT-2 setup, which took care of accounting, sales, support and executive row. This was like 10Base-T ethernet, with a patch-panel that was wired to RJ-45 jacks in the offices and the cubes, except it was completely incompatible with 10Base-T equipment. Media adapters for all! And when one of the adapters goes down, the whole TPT-2 system locks up, a hundred or so systems. Let's play the hunt-the-locked-adapter! So much fun when the CIO is screaming at you.
I went on vacation, and the engineers were left to figure out how to bring the network back on when one of these adapters froze. You'd think they would unplug the patch cords one at a time in the computer room until the network came back up, but no. They just remembered that I told them power cycling an adapter would usually bring it back online. So they powered down the building. Serious. They needed to reboot the building... by this time all the critical systems were on UPS, so nothing was fuxxored, but still.
I eventually got the penny-pinchers in charge of the business to invest in nice 100B-T and 10B-T switches and AUI adapters and a few nice new Sun servers. Worked much better thereafter.
Well... first off, it's got nothing to do with Linux. What we're talking about is a user interface that runs on top of X-windows. As such, it will run comfortably on any flavor of BSD or commercial Unix, and even stranger operating systems.
Second off, we're talking about a vast set of tools. Gnome is nice, KDE is nice, but they're pieces of a larger puzzle that includes X-windowing systems, and all of their assorted tools, drivers, and niceties, window managers, and applications that may or may not be designed to work within the look-and-feel guidelines of anything recognizeable at all. The problem space is way to big for any one person or organization to just decide, "Hey everyone, we're all gonna be doing THIS!"
Open source software grows and evolves as programmers scratch an itch. You can't crack the whip, as the project will just fork as programmers follow whatever their interest is... commercial, educational, political or just for the hell of coding something neat. It would be nice if everyone could assume a role that's perfectly suited for some master-plan to reach some goal... but they won't. Human nature is in the way.
Open Source Software is not a place where a single goal achieved by everyone working in unison is possible. Yes, Linux itself is cool... but how many variants, patches and forks of it are out there? Quite a few... people take what they need, and follow their own interest. This is what open source software is about. Even then, there's more than Linux: there are the three (Four... five?) BSD-based operating systems, and things like SkyOS and Haiku, besides.
In this maelstrom of variation and choice, you want a single standard UI? Not going to happen. What's more, it will likely work against Linux on the desktop rather than for it. Gnome came about because they didn't like KDE, and wanted something with different political and technical goals. KDE came about because the company had a different commercial and technical goal than Motif. Can you imagine how much it would suck if everyone working on KDE and Gnome were forced to work on making a better Motif? We're better off with many projects working for their own ends. Open Source means that the projects cna pick and chose what they like from each other, everyone wins.
Then there's the issue that Gnustep isn't a part of the discussion, despite being an Open Source re-implementation of the UI Apple uses for Mac OS X... so if the best solution isn't going to "win" anyway, it's pointless whining that the third or fourth best solution isn't getting all the attention. (And, as you've figured out, the order from "best" to "worst" won't be the same for everyone... or even a majority.)
In the end, it's up to the commercial distro-makers to decide what works for them, and to pay programmers and project leads and software architects to make it happen. The interface for the OLTP project shows how to get it done, and done on a shoestring budget in a tight time constraint.
Of course it's bad for broaddcasters. It's a disruptive technology... their heavy investments in NTSC cameras, editing suites and broadcast equipment is now obsolete, and it will cost a 25% premium over NTSC to upgrade to the new stuff. The competition for ad dollars is fiercer than it has ever been, with literally hundreds of channels... and advertisers are unlikely to shell out a 25% premium to advertise on HDTV broadcasts when they can use that money to buy a couple of slots on Animal Planet at 2:00am.
That said, this is the price to pay to stay in the industry. If you don't shell out the money for HDTV content, no-one is going to watch your content when everything else is in hi-def, which means that you won't make as much on advertising as you do now... so you either take the 25% hit at the leading edge, or you take a 25% (or more) hit later on when your service is devalued because you don't got it, and then you take another 25% hit when you scramble to catch up.
Invest now, or pay in red ink later.
This comes up in IT all the time... new technology is expensive, but you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage sticking with the tried and true when the competition is giving customers more service in less time with the expensive new thing. Some new tech is just hype, but when the real deal comes along, you had better be able to identify it and jump onboard... playing catchup is a great way to lose marketshare and piss away your profits upgrading in panic-mode.
Whining at the government is seldom a winning strategy, especially when the momentum is as strong as it is internationally.
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The retina doesn't get tired... it doesn't move.
The rest of the eye does as it tries to focus and refocus on a dark-but-not-dark environment, and the iris goes between contracting and expanding because it can't get a read whether it should be letting in more light because the background is too dark or contracting because the letters glow too bright, and the part of the brain running the ocular show will often make its displeasure felt in the form of splitting headaches.
For similar reasons, white text on a black background, while not as bad, isn't exactly good. This is why legal pads are pale yellow, and ledgers are pale green. Contrast is good, but too much contrast hurts.
Green on black terminal windows are the way they are for the same reason old oscilloscopes and radar displays were green on black - it's more cost effective to make a cathode ray tube that glows green. For a long damn time, all terminals came green-on-black, simply because that was the cheapest way to pair a CRT with a keyboard, and hardware terminals were what they used back before PC's were popular. Or invented.
The result of this was horrific eyestrain. Yes, some people can handle bright colored text on a black background. Most get eyestrain or worse, migraines. This is especially so if you switch from green-on-black to black-on-white (like a printed page).
Typists and transcriptionists and grad students and pretty much anyone who needed to refer to a printed reference hated it. In the early '80s, color monitors were pretty much crap for text (too fuzzy, not enough resolution) so there was a boom in the production of "amber" monitors. These used monochrome CRTs that phosphoresced a muted yellow-orange. This wasn't quite as jarring to the eyes.
Then someone came up with paper-white monochrome CRT's, and that was pretty much all she wrote for greenscreens.
Geeks keep it alive, because of nostalgia and tradition. It's looks high-tech and cool, because there was a time when it was high-tech and cool - and because there is an association with Unix, and by extension, Linux. What's more Unix than a DEC vt100 terminal hooked up to a PDP-11? Nothing. That's about as close to the metal as you can get without a soldering iron.
But, please, for the sake of your eyes and the eyes of others, don't pretend there is any inherent advantage to green-on-black for the vast majority of users.
When the Israelis destroyed the new, state-of-the-art Russian air defense system in Syria in 2007, the attacking aircraft didn't even appear on the radar they were destroying, and IED attacks are way down with the introduction of tech that... are we at the point where realtime countermeasures are the true state of the art in cyberwarfare, rather than the sideshow of internet security? What's the next step? Jamming enemy ICBM go-codes? Triggering remote detonation of same? Are we already at that point?
What makes it worse is that every now and again, Apple pulls out the stops to make a keyboard or mouse that isn't just good, it's legendary.
Serious. In the "Best Keyboard Ever" sweepstakes, there's the IBM Model M, and there's the Apple Extended II at the top, and then it falls off a cliff. Nothing else is anywhere near as good. There's a company charging almost $150 for a bog-standard 110 key USB keyboard - and getting it - because its key action and layout are almost exactly like the old Extended II.
Then Apple turns around and gives us crap like the new Son of Chicklet bluetooth rattleboard or the original iMac hockey-puck mouse. Madness, I tell you.
Since this is Cisco we're talking about, I'm looking forward to long nights memorizing oddball commands to pass the certification test. I can almost feel the one-coffee-too-many burning a slow ulcer into my esophagus while puzzling over the two-and-a-half bibles thick study guide.
Cisco makes mad, crazy money from certification tests. It's a way they can squeeze another dime from both out-of-work and desperate tech workers as well as companies confused as to exactly what their CIO bought when he went to play golf and came home with the Cisco polo shirt (and, oh, yeah, some contract or something. My name is going to be in Business week, and I got a shirt!)
Money all around, and all they need to do is pretend the advances in modern GUIs, scripting tool, shells and command line utilities the rest of the industry uses don't exist.
Now they want to take this esoteric-for-esoteric's-sake aesthetic across the entire enterprise! On the one hand, having that certification will mean a huge pay jump, as no-one will be able to design, deploy or maintain the sumbitch... I won't either, but I'll be making lots of money calling in Cisco consultants to do my job for me. I might get them to bring me a polo shirt. On the other, you will never be able to bring into the server room a new technology that Cisco/VMWare doesn't want in the server room, regardless of whether or not it's the right thing for your organization. It's like Bad Old IBM all over again if this thing gets any traction.
Part of the problem is that there isn't a good solution yet, so there's a lot of effort being put into trying to find a way for a bad solution to be more comfortable.
Old-school iterative languages are a clumsy fit. They're night impossible to debug, and ones that let you do clever things at the hardware level will bring the whole project down in screaming flames when someone tries to get clever. So new libraries for old languages seldom fill the bill.
New-hotness functional languages are insane. It's very, very, very difficult for seasoned programmers to get their heads around it, and impossible for n00bz who don't have heavy math backgrounds. Compounding the issue is that the syntax tends to be on the wrong side of horrible with little or no syntactic sugar to make the medicine go down. So re-imagining the paradigm is a bit like picturing a five dimensional sphere - great fun, if you're smart enough to do it. No-one is smart enough to do it.
We're probably looking at a problem space that is best tackled by something that doesn't exist yet - an elegant, easily understood tool that simply makes sense, like objects or everything-is-a-file or scripting languages or regex. We're seeing so many different approaches to MPP because programmers are trying to figure out what that tool is. Once someone hits on it, the field will shake itself out.
Since we haven't hit on it, too much choice is a good thing - it means people will take the initiative to do something on their own that works better, rather than trying to get something suboptimal to work because it's the "standard".
First things first... decide if you want the focus of the hobby to be the scopes or the stargazing.
If you're serious about the stargazing, forget the pricey glass. Get a decent set of binoculars and a few good books, and one of those plastic "Star Wheel" sky charts.
For the binocs, a basic pair of 10x70's will set you back a hundred and fifty bucks or so online. For the books, try Astronomy for Dummies and Left Turn at Orion. Also, your library will have back issues of Sky and Telescope - read 'em, and then visit their site. They have star maps you can print out that shows what's worth looking at each month. Try not to be too put out by their over-agressive marketeering.
The learning curve will be steeper than a big-bucks robotic "Goto Scope" that aims and focuses for you, but with a nice lawn chair, some decent binoculars and a rough understanding of what you're pointing them at, a night under the stars won't fail to deliver a few thrills.
Once that gets old, then look into the big-money glass. Telescopes, on their own, are a pretty damn rewarding hobby, especially once you get into making and modding them yourself. But unless you really, really know what you're after, dropping a grand on glass isn't a good idea. It likely won't be anywhere near what you want once you understand what that is.
There's also the issue of deep sky surveys - these require looooooooooooong exposures. If you park your butt in front of a telescope in your backyard for a look through it, you will see more detail the longer you're parked. Your eye is able to pick out more information with longer exposure. So it is with imaging. Yeah, a really big mirror like on Palomar means you don't need to spend as much time imaging the same section of space as a smaller scope to capture equivalent detail, but here's the deal: the HST can look at the same thing for 20 minutes at a time, ekeing out every last little photon it can from the scene. Then it will do it all over again on the next orbit. And again, and again... each 20 minute pass adding to the cumulative light captured, until it's equivalent to an eleven day exposure. You're not going to get lucky enough to get eleven days worth of distortion-free viewing from a terrestrial scope without inviting in all sorts of software artifacts, sorry.
So, Lucky Imaging's a great step forward for some dirtside scope applications... less so for others, and not a replacement at all for a decent space-based instrument.
Speaking from experience, if you are:
1) Intelligent enough to win a D&D tournament
2) Lucky enough with the dice to win a D&D tournament
3) Big and strong enough to literally bash through a wall
Then, yes, the one, single, supa-hot D&D honey will be all-up-ons. And lordy, lordy, will she ever be into cosplay, with more vinyl and leather than you can conceive of... super bonus round for fetish-addled roleplay freaks. Hot chicks love a fat geek, so long as he can kill a jock with his bare hands and understands the difference between her Sailor Moon costume and her Sailor Mars costume.
The rest of you will die alone.
OK, the guy covers Japan, and sneers about the lack of uppercrust genes making their way downward to the hoi-polloi of Japanese society.
Yet he somehow fails to mention they went from medieval backwater to global Superpower in about the same amount of time it takes a Skyline GTR to go from zero to sixty. Just ask the Russians - they might still have Czars if the Japanese hadn't kicked the crap out of the mighty Russian Imperial Navy, a scant half-century after the Black Ships arrived. They're still a global superpower, in terms of industrial, scientific and economic influence. They were in the "Malthusan Trap" because the nobility liked it that way, and could get away with it until the advent of the steam engine. No other reason.
So, in short, the book's crap, and just another excuse for right-wingers to justify spreading colonialism the globe over, as some sort of natural gift given to them for being better bred than the mud-people.
SoupIsGood Food
The Fermi paradox is just proof that there are much better forms of communication technology waiting to be discovered. Ansible users are at a stage where it probably doesn't occur to them that a culture worth talking to would use electromagnetic radiation as a communications carrier.
SoupIsGood Food
You're European, so you can be forgiven if you've never seen 1) a real American SUV and 2) a real American Home Depot. Jetta wagons generally don't cut it when there are sheets of plywood to be hauled around.
The typical American family is a two car family. One of these cars will be a sensible sedan. One of them will be a truck - Pickup, SUV or minivan. This is because big trucks are practical for moving people, carrying stuff anf towing things. Otherwise, they'd be spending like no tomorrow on muscle cars like the Mustang, which are much more bad-ass and look-at-me-cool than a bland-as-stale-bread Chevy Tahoe or Ford F150.
Also, the "Estate Wagons" the SUV's replaced were in some cases considerably larger than the SUV's now. Do a GIS for "Caprice Station Wagon" sometime.
So, the cars just won't be getting smaller due to cultural influences I don't expect you to understand... it's just so. The trick is then not to sell smaller cars, but to make larger cars more efficient and lighter. The whole deal about "the mountain coming to Muhommed" and King Canute with the waves thing. The Prius makes a mid-size car subcompact efficient. This is the right way to go.
SoupIsGood Food
Tiny cars don't sell well. They're difficult to schlep kids to school and a dozen bags of mulch home from Lowe's. Small cars are seen as unitakers, and most americans need their cars to fill a number of roles.
Plus, without a way to recharge the battery in roughly the time it takes to fill up a gas tank, what the hell are these things good for? Short distance commuting? Corbin already tried it, with a better looking mini-car, and failed. Miserably. Americans generally have no use for automotive unitaskers - most of them have long highway commutes and the occasional road-trip, and they want to do both in the same car.
Ugly cars also don't sell well. I don't mean "Quirky styling" like the Scion xB or Suzuki Aero, or bland styling, like a Chrysler Sebring or Toyota Corolla. I mean, East German levels of "Couldn't Be Bothered With It" styling: truly and deeply misguided design choices no-one paused to give a second thought to, complete with panel gaps you can see with the naked eye from low earth orbit and colors chosen for their complete inability to catch the eye.
Efficient and cheap isn't going to get you anywhere near public acceptance. It's got to offer a lot more... the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius look goood, they're slick productions with a lot more to offer than 50mpg. The Prius in particular has been successful because it offers near-luxury comfort and conveniences with econobox mileage and futuristic styling. (The other hybrid makers are also having a hard time grokking this, so we get Hybrid Civics and Mariners no-one is particularly enthusiastic over.)
The Smart FourTwo is a tiny, inexpensive car with great styling and sybaritic creature comforts, and Daimler =still= won't bring it to the US because there's no real market for it here. The Think, an ugly plug-in doo-dad, is doomed before it even starts. Dell? Try Osbourne.
SoupIsGood Food
Yeah, right.... And all those purchasers of 300hp cars are thinking of outrunning the cops?
.44 magnum wheelgun"... That sounds like that would break your wrist on the first shot, let alone allow for a followup shot.
.45-70 rounds could do to an armored limo... and there are models out there that break down to fit into a slimline briefcase.
No, they're just planning to break traffic laws. Unless you believe they'll all stay under the posted speed limit, not engage in stoplight drags or peel out on public roadways. I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale you'll just love if that's the case. They buy powerful cars because they envision using them. The right to own a powerful car comes with the responsibility to use that power wisely. Not everyone will.
If I was going up against multiple assailants with body armor, none of your listed weapons would be on my list, for one reason - good luck getting a followup shot in from those hand cannons. And I don't even want to think about firing a "scandium-alloy
The sort of gun buyer interested in defeating police body armor isn't going to be at the range practicing double-tap combat technique. They want something that they can pull on an unsuspecting target at point-blank range.
If you want to go through any armor known to man with a shotgun, just use a good old slug round.
The Box o' Truth disagrees with you on this.
Take your anti-gun trolling claims of "cop killer" elsewhere...
I'm not anti-gun by any stretch. I believe anyone who can show they are responsible and educated in their responsibilities should be able to own any damn thing they please. That said, I don't have romantic notions about most gun owners being responsible or educated in their responsibilities, nor do I have any illusions that snub-nosed revolvers chambered for Bear Medicine rounds are meant for brown bear when the owner is in Baltimore.
If anything, it means that greater effort needs to be spent in developing and deploying body armor and bulletproofing in general. Don't get me started on what a modern lever-action rifle loaded with Buffalo Bore
~ Soup
I dunno. There's a lot of new stupid-huge caliber snub revolvers on the market. Ruger's Redhawk Alaskan in .454 Casull and .480, and now S&W and Taurus have .500 S&W snubbies. Any of these weapons will shred any vest on the market, while offering a high degree of concealability. There are scandium-alloy .44 magnum wheelguns out there that will penetrate most vests, while weighing less than standard police-issue service autopistol. More powerful weapons are showing up in the autoloader arena, too, like the FN 5.7 and specialty "full house" rounds being developed for the 1911 frame. Gun buyers have to be thinking of defeating body armor when purchasing these weapons, as grizzly attacks in the cities and suburbs aren't exactly on the rise... yet that's where the sales of the "hand cannons" are the strongest.
The police, them have a little gun/
So when I'm on the streets, I walk around with a bigger one. - KRS-One
The song remains the same. Better equipped cops usually means better equipped cop killers. The availability of tungsten buckshot in magnum shells is also telling... body armor is getting marginally better while anti-armor weapons are getting dramatically better.
SoupIsGood Food
Of course there's competition, and it can be quite fierce. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL comes immediately to mind. These projects have developers and users that are in fierce competition with each other. See also emacs vs. vi, Apache vs. Lighttpd, Python vs. Ruby. The difference is that Postgres "stealing" MySQL code would be pointless... it doesn't fit in with the project direction. This is why the vim project hasn't eagerly taken all of GNU's emacs code and rolled it into their latest realease... "vi - now with emacs!"
In the open source world, the competition is to create the most useful product for any given niche.
In the closed source world, it's (generally) to drive out all the competition from your niche, to increase your market share and thereby your profitability. This is why they're paranoid about their source code falling into the wrong hands. Oracle is a prime example of a company that doesn't really understand this distinction - yes, they "stole" a Linux distro to get into the Linux service provider game. Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell are giving a collective yawn - they're in business to provide the best product for a given niche, and by engineering it, they know customers will come to them before they go to a "me too" distro vendor for support on a codebase they didn't even engineer. Oracle would have done better for itself if it decided to adopt one of the non-commercial distros like Debian or Gentoo and advertised support services for it rather than trying to gain a "jump" on Red Hat by swiping their distro. Not only does Red Hat not care, they're likely to clean up by competing with Oracle as the best service provider for Oracle's own produic. (Whether or no Red Hat =is= the best service provider, or is rusting on its laurels is not within the scope of discussion.)
SoupIsGood Food
Umm... uniting, not dividing. Stoopit submit button, too close to preview button. D'oh. Still, you get the gist.
None of the example countries that became modern democracies were Islamic. Religion that demands theocracy cannot tolerate democracy. That isn't a genetic barrier, but a deep, superstitious cultural barrier.
I hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing secular from religious power in Islamic society were broken by the Umyyad Dynasty less than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad. You may want to spend some time with Wikipedia on the history of Islam and Arab culture... and no, the two are not the same thing.
Theocracy is no more inimical to Islam than it is to Christianity... and it's plagued both. Theocratic rule can be justified by fanatics cherry-picking verses from scripture, and used as an excuse to do scary and psychotic things, no matter what your religion. (See: Spanish Inquisition, Forced Conversion in the Americas, 30 Years War, Hugenot suppression, etc.) Given their respective histories, I'd be more suspect of Mormons seeking a theocracy than mainstream Shia and Suuni. The problem is, the mainstream is being marginalized by the fanatics these days, and this seems to be a global issue not limited to Islam.
Also note, Bosnia is now a modern democracy after a rough start, as is Kyrgyzstan and Albania, all of them Islamic. Might as well toss in the Autonomous Regions of Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo... two stable and progressive Islamic democracies.
SoupIsGood Food
Most of Europe never had Democracy. It came to pass as all national conflicts were being won by liberal democracies... or as close to a liberal democracy as was possible in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's only come to the Eastern European powers... Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia... in the past 15 years. They seem to be doing OK with the concept despite only Czechoslovakia having any experience at all with democracy. South Korea and Taiwan have all moved from authoritarianism to democracy with great results.
Democracy starts slowly, and gradually improves itself... in early-stage democracy, it's more about the promise than the actuality. The United States had a small issue with slavery, as you may recall, and with its treatment of the indigenous peoples. Still, it's a lot better today than it was even forty years ago. Democracy, with it's partners Human Rights and Rule of Law, allows progress to happen.
I harbor contempt and distrust for the mindset that certain types of people are somehow genetically exempt from modern forms of self-government... to my ears, it sounds suspiciously like "Democracy, Human Rights and the Rule of Law only applies to rich white people, because they're the only ones intelligent and enlightened enough to benefit from it."
(That said, forcing change from the outside at gunpoint seldom works well - for any governmental system imposed. See: Iraq. Engagement in the form of clever political pressure, applied covertly inside the nation and through geopolitical maneuvering, works somewhat better. This is the best course of action in Russia's case.)
SoupIsGood Food
Buffer overruns happen. Security models have holes. This is nothing new, and you'll find it in damn near every software project of any complexity.
The rational ways of dealing with this are a very dictatorial style of project management to get it right the first time (See: OpenBSD) or a quick and responsive way to kill security-affecting bugs dead. Firefox, with its gazillions of volunteer and paid programmers, opt for the latter. Too often, closed source developers just sit on these bugs, or sue the people trying to find and publish them, or use their marketing department to cover for their developers' shortcomings.
I'm pleased and reassured that Firefox is having these issues. Active and open security research will always result in a stronger product, and delays to deal with them are acceptable so long as the software is better for it. Even OpenBSD's been hacked a few times, and it's how you deal with it that's more important.
Microsoft's stuff is broken for =years=, which allows a security nightmare. Firefox is broken for a few days, or a month or two... too quick for all but the most dedicated and talented black-hats to take advantage of. Give me this over Internet Exploder any day.
When will we see a stable and secure project? That's an important question when dealing with closed source products. On something like Mozilla, with an open development model, the project goals and progress aren't company secrets... we actually know exactly why something has been pushed back, and can make reasonable judgements about when it will be back on track for ourselves. This is one of the more important aspects of open source that corporate IT overlooks... the ability to plan for and work around changes in the release schedule.
So, yeah, setbacks happen. To everyone. How the setbacks are dealt with is where the rubber meets the road. Firefox is generally ahead of the industry here, too.
It's a clear sign that Google is growing way too fast for its own good, and spending crazy money on stupid things simply for the sake of spending crazy money. It's in Microsoft's best interest to spend down some of its war-chest to get Google to bankrupt itself with follies, or at least get it down to Yahoo-size in terms of industry influence.
Microsoft can afford spending what seems to be stupid-huge money as a long-range strategy of slowing and co-opting all software technology advancement... it will stifle, then copy, then control then monopolize any and all emerging technology markets. It will spend whatever it costs and take however long it needs to meet these goals. In the end, Microsoft will either make a mint, or make damn sure no-one else can.
Google needs to start saving some of its massive new revenue to build a war-chest, and work on solidifying and expanding the control of the market it's already got. Building the War-Chest, massive reserves of cash and assets that can be flipped for a quick buck, is especially important. John Sculley did this at Apple just before things went bad, and it saw the company through years and years of hell. Playing Microsoft's money-wasting game, acting like it's the '70s in Silicon Valley, will get you bankrupt and wondering where the good times went.
The years have dimmed my recollection, but you are right on all counts. The accuracy with which you describe the horror of AUI and BNC T-connectors (and terminators that always detach themselves for no good reason) indicates that you might still be living with these abominations... kill it... kill it with fire...
OK. This was in the late nineties for a small computer hardware firm that had been in business since the '70s... but still, there was no excuse for this. It was a rambling wreck, a crazy collection of every ethernet standard implementation, and a few that were decidedly non-standard, just sort of tossed into place as time went on.
The backbone was a five port AUI concentrator... it was too primitive to be called a hub. (AUI was Sun's insane proprietary ethernet connector.) Hanging off that was a Sun server that was shiny and new when the Soviet Union was still in the news, which was the router to the DMZ, and a media adapter for thicknet. That thumb-thick yellow cable snaked over to the engineering cubes and hardware labs, with "vampire taps" hanging off it everywhere - vampire taps have a screw that drills into the cable, which is how you hook stuff up to thicknet. No lie. These were connected to 10Base-5 thin-net adapters, which hooked up to co-ax concentrators, which hooked up to AUI media adapters which hooked up to the various Sun workstations. I had never seen before, nor have I seen since, a BNC co-ax hub used just to hook up workstations in a star topology... for whatever reason, they decided that ring topology wasn't good enough to string five lightly used workstations together. I have no idea why any of this worked. It usually didn't, and needed various pieces of arcane equipment power-cycled and jiggled and cursed at to get any data to make it from the file servers to the workstations.
It gets worse. Another port on the AUI concentrator went to the Cabletron TPT-2 setup, which took care of accounting, sales, support and executive row. This was like 10Base-T ethernet, with a patch-panel that was wired to RJ-45 jacks in the offices and the cubes, except it was completely incompatible with 10Base-T equipment. Media adapters for all! And when one of the adapters goes down, the whole TPT-2 system locks up, a hundred or so systems. Let's play the hunt-the-locked-adapter! So much fun when the CIO is screaming at you.
I went on vacation, and the engineers were left to figure out how to bring the network back on when one of these adapters froze. You'd think they would unplug the patch cords one at a time in the computer room until the network came back up, but no. They just remembered that I told them power cycling an adapter would usually bring it back online. So they powered down the building. Serious. They needed to reboot the building... by this time all the critical systems were on UPS, so nothing was fuxxored, but still.
I eventually got the penny-pinchers in charge of the business to invest in nice 100B-T and 10B-T switches and AUI adapters and a few nice new Sun servers. Worked much better thereafter.
Well... first off, it's got nothing to do with Linux. What we're talking about is a user interface that runs on top of X-windows. As such, it will run comfortably on any flavor of BSD or commercial Unix, and even stranger operating systems.
Second off, we're talking about a vast set of tools. Gnome is nice, KDE is nice, but they're pieces of a larger puzzle that includes X-windowing systems, and all of their assorted tools, drivers, and niceties, window managers, and applications that may or may not be designed to work within the look-and-feel guidelines of anything recognizeable at all. The problem space is way to big for any one person or organization to just decide, "Hey everyone, we're all gonna be doing THIS!"
Open source software grows and evolves as programmers scratch an itch. You can't crack the whip, as the project will just fork as programmers follow whatever their interest is... commercial, educational, political or just for the hell of coding something neat. It would be nice if everyone could assume a role that's perfectly suited for some master-plan to reach some goal... but they won't. Human nature is in the way.
Open Source Software is not a place where a single goal achieved by everyone working in unison is possible. Yes, Linux itself is cool... but how many variants, patches and forks of it are out there? Quite a few... people take what they need, and follow their own interest. This is what open source software is about. Even then, there's more than Linux: there are the three (Four... five?) BSD-based operating systems, and things like SkyOS and Haiku, besides.
In this maelstrom of variation and choice, you want a single standard UI? Not going to happen. What's more, it will likely work against Linux on the desktop rather than for it. Gnome came about because they didn't like KDE, and wanted something with different political and technical goals. KDE came about because the company had a different commercial and technical goal than Motif. Can you imagine how much it would suck if everyone working on KDE and Gnome were forced to work on making a better Motif? We're better off with many projects working for their own ends. Open Source means that the projects cna pick and chose what they like from each other, everyone wins.
Then there's the issue that Gnustep isn't a part of the discussion, despite being an Open Source re-implementation of the UI Apple uses for Mac OS X... so if the best solution isn't going to "win" anyway, it's pointless whining that the third or fourth best solution isn't getting all the attention. (And, as you've figured out, the order from "best" to "worst" won't be the same for everyone... or even a majority.)
In the end, it's up to the commercial distro-makers to decide what works for them, and to pay programmers and project leads and software architects to make it happen. The interface for the OLTP project shows how to get it done, and done on a shoestring budget in a tight time constraint.
Of course it's bad for broaddcasters. It's a disruptive technology... their heavy investments in NTSC cameras, editing suites and broadcast equipment is now obsolete, and it will cost a 25% premium over NTSC to upgrade to the new stuff. The competition for ad dollars is fiercer than it has ever been, with literally hundreds of channels... and advertisers are unlikely to shell out a 25% premium to advertise on HDTV broadcasts when they can use that money to buy a couple of slots on Animal Planet at 2:00am.
That said, this is the price to pay to stay in the industry. If you don't shell out the money for HDTV content, no-one is going to watch your content when everything else is in hi-def, which means that you won't make as much on advertising as you do now... so you either take the 25% hit at the leading edge, or you take a 25% (or more) hit later on when your service is devalued because you don't got it, and then you take another 25% hit when you scramble to catch up.
Invest now, or pay in red ink later.
This comes up in IT all the time... new technology is expensive, but you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage sticking with the tried and true when the competition is giving customers more service in less time with the expensive new thing. Some new tech is just hype, but when the real deal comes along, you had better be able to identify it and jump onboard... playing catchup is a great way to lose marketshare and piss away your profits upgrading in panic-mode.
Whining at the government is seldom a winning strategy, especially when the momentum is as strong as it is internationally.
~ SoupIsGood Food
SoupIsGood Food